The Vigil

October 4

I was supposed to make the film Accattone with the producers Cervi and Iacovoni. I was supposed to leave in early September. But around that time, the two producers quite suddenly, and unexpectedly, seemed uncertain, distracted, absent to me. Or was it I who was feeling a little sheepish? Not without reason, of course, given my state of disgrace, so to speak, in the eyes of officialdom and the clergy. And so I went to Fellini. Who that same summer had founded Federiz, his production company, together with Rizzoli. And he had asked me several times, with Fracassi, if he could produce my film himself. Actually, he had negotiated with two young men from the Ajace firm, but without ever reaching an agreement (which would have led to a co-production). My contract with Cervi and Iacovoni involved a different project, however, La commare secca [The Grim Reaper], which I’d since abandoned. Since I hadn’t received any advance, I was free. The summer was going by, and my inspiration was, well, slipping away. And so I went to see Fellini, who greeted me with a big hug. During those same days in early September he was furnishing the company’s new offices in Via della Croce, and he was doing it with a youthful pleasure and pride, and preening a little, of course. We embraced and got down to work.

This was how I spent what I think were the happiest days of my life. I had almost all the characters there, and I began having them photographed, dozens and dozens of photographs. By a trusty photographer, who was entirely caught up in my virginal enthusiasm. And by Attilio Bertolucci’s son, Bernardo, who was equally caught up. The faces, the bodies, the streets, the squares, the shanties piled on top of one another, the fragments of tenements, the black walls of crumbling highrises, the mud, the hedgerows, the meadows of the urban outskirts strewn with bricks and garbage: everything presented itself in a fresh, new, thrilling light, as if absolute, heavenly.

Accattone, Skinny Giorgio, Scucchia, Alfredino, Crazy Peppe, the Sheriff, Bassetto, Gnaccia; and then the Pigneto quarter, Via Formia, the Borgata Gordiani, the streets of Testaccio; and the women – Maddalena, Ascensa, Stella; and Balilla and Cartagine – all of them captured in sumptuous shots, carefully selected and placed in order: frontal stuff, but anything but stereotyped, lined up as if waiting to start moving, living. Then, at Fellini’s suggestion, I made some rushes – in other words, I effectively shot the film twice, almost in its entirety.

Those were glorious days in which the summer still blazed in all its purity, only slightly drained of its fury from within. Via Fanfulla da Lodi, in the middle of the Pigneto quarter, with its small, low houses and crumbling little walls, had, in its minuteness, a grandiose graininess about it: a poor, humble, unknown little street, lost in the sunlight, in a Rome that wasn’t Rome.

We filled it up: a dozen actors, the cameraman, the grip hands, the sound crews. But since there were no groups of onlookers – I didn’t want even to hear any mention of them – the whole operation took place in a calm atmosphere. They all seemed like workers mingling with other workers who had jobs in the small workshops of the Pigneto.

I would never have imagined that directing a film could be so extraordinary. I would choose the quickest, simplest way of representing what I had written in the script. Small visual blocks juxtaposed in orderly fashion, but almost crudely. I had Dreyer’s suggestion inside me: in reality I was following a guideline of utter simplicity of expression. It would take too long to go into detail: struggling with the light, its continuous, obsessive mutations, struggling with an old movie camera, struggling with my actors from Tor Pignattara, all of them, like me, on a film set for the first time. But these were struggles that always found resolution in small, comforting victories.

I got no sleep during the three nights of the shoot. I was always thinking about the film as if inside a sort of radiant nightmare. Every few minutes I was awakened with a start by these sorts of brief, pleasurable internal hemorrhages, at the start of which would appear the shots or the sequence of shots I was supposed to film the following day or of scenes that would come gradually into my head while sleeping. I spent a whole night blinded by the sun at Ciriola sul Tevere, beneath the Castel Sant’Angelo, with the faces of Alfredino and Luciano laughing, squinting their eyes and making wrinkles round the eyes, with that sly laughter of theirs that demolishes all of life’s rules with an ancient, historic joy. The faces of peons, of ship’s boys on the Potemkin, of monks.

The ordeals with the press, with the moviola, the montage, the sound track, would require a whole volume of memoirs – especially for the uninitiated, of which I was one. At last two scenes were ready, and then began the wait, about which there was no reason to feel doubtful but which nevertheless made me keenly aware of resting on nothing, on a fate that didn’t move, that had no future.

I get bored, you know, restlessly bored, in front of meaningless pages. And then suddenly, as expected, the telephone rings, as if to confirm all this. It’s Franco, who’s supposed to play Accattone, the protagonist. By now he’s been calling me every day at this hour over the past week – pointlessly, which he knew. And with him his brother Sergio, my old, irreplaceable assistant, my living dictionary of the Roman dialect, and everyone else. And my anxiety is aggravated by theirs. I don’t know how to calm them down, how to treat their potential disappointment. Fellini, yesterday, grabbed the film can and went and looked at the material by himself. We were supposed to do it together, with the actors included, just so they’d be a little encouraged... Only later did Fellini phone me to let me know. In reality it was understandable, and right, for him to act that way. But then the silence returned, I waited all morning for a phone call. Nothing.

The Federiz offices are open and empty with their beautiful white curtains with green trim, of fine fabric, their furniture reminiscent of a rich, airy refectory. I enter, and there, suddenly, without mystery, is Riccardo Fellini, and there is Fracassi, in his office. As I come in, so does Fellini himself by chance, through an internal door. The Great Mystifier is unable to hide, behind his eye-shadow, that I’ve come unexpectedly, and a bit early, but he still welcomes me with an embrace. He’s clean and sleek, hearty as a wild animal in a cage. He brings me into the other room, his office. And as he’s sitting down, he tells me at once that he wants to be frank with me (ouch!), and that the material he’s seen hasn’t convinced him, not at all...

I knew it already. It had been clear for at least ten days that he wouldn’t like it, perhaps since the first evening when I went to him to suggest that he produce the film –  whether or not he was aware of it himself. And so I’m not surprised. And I discuss it with him out of a pure and simple love of clarity and the truth.

What is it, in essence, that Fellini doesn’t like? The poverty, the sloppiness, the coarseness, the awkward, almost anonymous pedantry with which I’ve shot the scene. Fine, I agree. It was my first experiment. For the first time in my life I found myself behind a movie camera, and this movie camera was all beat up, old, and could hold only a little film at a time. I was supposed to film an entire scene in a day. And the actors too were in front of a movie camera for the first time. What was I supposed to do, work a miracle? Yes, of course, Fellini had been expecting a miracle. Which didn’t occur, because, having no experience with results, I found myself in the end with close-ups that were middle-distance shots, with great big heads à la Dreyer that were common close-ups, slow tracking shots that were supposed to be fast, muddy light that was actually clear and vice versa. What was missing, in short, in that scene was the sort of finish that is style itself: in other words, a miracle.

Nevertheless, if I had to shoot the scene again – which was one of the specific questions Fellini asked me – yes, I would shoot it again with the same rhythm: fast, rushed, sloppy, tossed out, functional, without shading, without atmosphere, with everything on the characters’ shoulders. In fact I’d like to shoot the whole film that way.